What Does a Support Center Do?

Let's start with an academic description of a support center. The one below is an excerpt from a summer 1999 group assignment for students of the business school at Pace University in New York City:

Your firm wants to establish a new call center to serve the NAFTA region. The company is a large service organization that repairs or replaces electronic entertainment equipment. The call center operator makes repair or replacement decisions based on the information that is called in from a database. The repair decision is based on a set of computerized rules.

The application of the computerized rules will determine the action taken by the operator. If the item is to be repaired either the product will be returned to a regional repair depot or a local field service will be dispatched to the customer's location. The nature of the repair activity will be determined by the general business rules and by the type of service contract held by the customer.

The remainder of the project description indicates the number of calls the support center handles per month and per year, as well as the average length of a call.

To fulfill the assignment,...